Paul Simon’s lyrics speak to me now: “Old friends. Sat on their park bench like bookends…Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park bench, quietly. How terribly strange to be seventy…” Not yet. But when we’re there, I’ll be ready.
My three besties and I had sleepovers for our birthdays from the age of 10 to 21 years. These happened four times a year and were the highlight of our social life. There was no dressing up or make-up involved. In fact, the real party began only after the parents went to bed and we changed into pajamas. We giggled late into the night, and sometimes slept outdoors on the terrace or lawn.
The Delhi summer nights were hot and we were stocked with old Johnny Walker whisky bottles, sweaty with condensation from the cold water in them. In junior school, the conversations would drift between the math teacher, the nuns at school, the eccentrics at church and colony gossip. In high school and college, we spoke in whispers of crushes. Evie could be counted on to have at least one object of unrequited love at any given point of time. I listened with envy to stories of college canteens and festivals, while I told of the boredom and gore of medical college. Our homes offered no entertainment, other than a delicious long night with nowhere to go and nothing to do. They were where we slow cooked our friendship.
After some lean times in medical school, the kindred spirits continued to crop up like little flowers along the cracks in sidewalks. But something changed when my kids came along. I was no longer the most important person in my life. Meeting with friends started to feel like a luxury. There were hurried plans and we tried to catch up quickly in the one hour we had over lunch or coffee. Sometimes when I shared a room at a conference with my friend Ilgi and we talked late into the night, I felt like I was having an affair. I felt guilty for having fun, while my husband was ‘watching the kids’.
When I met Jo, I had two kids under four years. We met for work at her organisation and from the start, we knew this was special. We plotted ways to meet at conferences and hung out afterwards, drinking coffee or wine, depending on the hour. We had endless discussions — about our work, our lives and books. Always books. In meetings, Jo and I exchanged notes with each other like schoolgirls, commenting on the speakers. “This one is a POW (Pompous Old Windbag),” proclaimed one from Jo, which became a classic (those of you who have watched The Jungle Book 15 times with your kids will get the Colonel Hathi reference). The meetings would always end too soon.
When we worked together, it was suspect — we had too much fun. Our colleagues and spouses rolled their eyes,saying, “Yeah right. You’re working.” The time together was turgid with things we needed to pack in. I made lists titled ‘Things to discuss with Jo’ for our phone calls and we went through our lists with urgency when we spoke.
Last year, something shifted for me. I took a sabbatical, and mostly dedicated it to my friends and family. After years of intense work and child rearing, it took a while for my breathing and heart rate to settle to normal. In the quiet that followed, I found myself savouring many things — my food, books, the beach, the trees and my friends. In other words, I slowed down.
The word ‘slow’, for the most part, is not greeted with enthusiasm. No one likes a slow Internet connection or Amazon delivery. In my line of work, if a child is a ‘slow learner’ or has ‘slow processing skills’, it is not good news. Recently, I was introduced to the theory of ‘crip time’ in Sara Hendren’s book What Can a Body Do. There are assumptions around time and timelines that simply cannot be applied to disabled people. Whether it is the number of hours of sleep you need, the time it takes to get ready for school, the number of breaks you need to complete a task or a timeline of when you have to be able to live independently — it is just different if you are disabled or have a chronic illness. But who says we need to keep pace with what is considered a ‘normal timeline’? As disabled queer writer Alison Kafer says, what if we “bend the clock instead of our bodies” and free ourselves from the need to catch up?
I’m back from my sabbatical, but that sentiment lingers. I visited Jo in Dehradun recently for an event and stayed an extra two days. She was, as always, a blur of activity, but I was not. I noticed the flowers from her garden in my bathroom, the books she thought I might like laid out by my bed and the delicious honey bread I love that she baked before I got there.
We went for walks and talked, and I didn’t have a list. One night, we sat in a companionable silence as she wrote while I read my book. The comfort of an old friendship hovered in the air, settled on us and tucked us in.
I’m thinking of reclaiming the pace of my friendships from school days. I want to be a slow friend. That person who has more than the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee to spare for a friend. I want to rediscover each of my friends the way I reread favourite old books — I read them the first time for the plot and then again for the beauty of the prose. Paul Simon’s lyrics speak to me now: “Old friends. Sat on their park bench like bookends…Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park bench, quietly. How terribly strange to be seventy…” Not yet. But when we’re there, I’ll be ready.
The writer, a developmental paediatrician in Mumbai, is founder of the NGO Ummeed
National Editor Shalini Langer curates the fortnightly ‘She Said’ column
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First uploaded on: 29-09-2024 at 01:15 IST
